Work — App & Software Dev
Live · festival.mikeamis.co.uk
Festival Companion
- Stage
- Live
- Role
- Design, build, maintain
- Field
- Festivals · Timetables · Progressive web app
- Stack
- Next.js · Service Worker · Cloudflare Workers
- Live at
- festival.mikeamis.co.uk
An offline-first festival companion with the complete Houghton timetable, personal schedules, clash detection, QR sharing, calendar export and push reminders.
Free · No account · Installable · Works offline
01 — What it does
6 parts
A festival timetable has to work where the signal does not
- The complete timetable, properly groupedAll 342 published sets across fourteen stages, organised by the festival day they belong to rather than blindly by calendar date. A 03:00 Sunday set stays under Saturday, exactly as it appears on Houghton's timetable.
- A personal schedule that catches clashesBookmark acts from anywhere in the app and they become a chronological schedule. Overlaps are calculated precisely, back-to-back sets are left alone, and every conflict shows both stages, both times and the minutes lost between them.
- Fast routes through a large lineupFilter by day, stage or bookmarked sets; search artists, stages and aliases instantly; see what is live, what has finished and what comes next. The bundled site map remains available alongside the timetable.
- Schedules that move between phonesShare a compact QR code, a copied code, a readable summary or a file. The receiving phone previews every recognised and missing act before it changes anything, and a second schedule can be saved for side-by-side comparison.
- Reminders beyond the appExport every bookmarked set to a standard calendar, or opt into a push notification fifteen minutes before it starts. The reminder reaches the lock screen and a paired Apple Watch without requiring an account or a native app.
- Offline by constructionThe timetable, every route, every stage page, the map and the application code are installed as one atomic offline shell. A failed update keeps the previous complete version; a successful timetable revision preserves bookmarks and explains anything that moved or disappeared.
02 — Why it exists
Festival weekends are hostile to ordinary web apps: crowded networks, flat batteries, a timetable spread across a PDF, and several people trying to coordinate different plans. Festival Companion turns that into one installable, pocket-sized tool for Houghton 2026.
The useful moment for a festival timetable is exactly when a normal website is least dependable: in a field, surrounded by thousands of phones, deciding whether there is enough time to cross the site before the next set. A PDF can contain the information, but it cannot tell you what is playing now, remember your plan, warn that two choices overlap or compare that plan with somebody else's.
Houghton's source timetable was a dense InDesign grid rather than structured data. Its vertical rules defined stages, its horizontal rules defined set boundaries, and the printed hour labels sat half an hour away from the obvious interpretation. The extraction was converted into a reviewable CSV, normalised into stable entry IDs and then checked stage by stage against the original before the app was marked verified.
The other constraint was trust. There is no login, database, analytics layer or central copy of anyone's weekend. Bookmarks and comparisons live on the phone. Export happens only when somebody asks for it, and the optional reminder service receives an opaque device identifier and known timetable IDs—never a name, account or location. The result behaves more like a field tool than a small social network, which is what a festival schedule should be.
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